Being in a long-term cohabiting monogamous relationship was a powerful learning experience for a number of reasons. The most obvious one is that you have someone around all of the time who you need to negotiate with, account for, and keep happy.
There are a few less obvious reasons why it's such a learning experience. If you spend a few years removed from the dating game, you have the opportunity to view it from a much more dispassionate perspective with the pressure off. Also if you're publicly unavailable you can practise flirting without consequence, which is useful for calibrating your sense of what you can and can't get away with.
You also have access to a relationship dynamic which is generally unavailable to the single: people with whom you have mutually-acknowledged mutual attraction that isn't going to get acted upon. "Here's a crapload of tension we can't do anything about. Let's talk about it." It's like Christmas Day football in no-man's-land.
This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of September 17th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:
Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.
Thanks to everyone who contributes!
Previous diary; archive of prior diaries.
(Sorry for being late, I don't even have an excuse at all! Oh well.)